Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Tanja tackles friendship…

My personal Facebook page lasted two hours. I signed up with little
enthusiasm but felt a general social pressure to “get with it”. The
first posting that arrived was the writer’s thoughts on the sunrise that
day. The next was a response to that. The third was about waiting for
his kids to come out to the car, and I was so shocked by the
mind-deadening triviality of this new information highway that I got off
at the next stop. The only reason I keep my personal page is that it’s a
requirement in order to have a business page. I never look at it. Ever.

Tanja Alexia Hollander
is a Maine-based fine art photographer who has been around. But she’s
not of my generation and therefore would have been easier with the
Facebook way of finding new friends, and staying in touch with old
friends and family members. But she obviously wondered to herself at
some point how it would all hold up if these “post-ers” were brought
from cyberspace into the light of the real world.

Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend?has recently opened at the Portland Museum of Art and runs through June 17, 2012. Tanja must be grinning from ear to ear because the media – from The Boston Globe to MPBN – have been happy to embrace this quirky exhibit, and it’s getting terrific mileage.

If you've been buzzing about "Are You Really
My Friend?" the new installation of Facebook-inspired portraits by local
photographer and Bakery Photo Collective founder Tanja Alexia
Hollander, you're not alone. Any high-profile intersection between the
fine-art world and a massively influential populist medium is bound to
cause a stir.

Some excitement comes
from factors outside of Hollander's practice. One of the exhibit's major
draws is the totalizing cultural fluency of the language of Facebook —
even its most ardent detractors at least know how it works. Of course,
displaying hundreds of locals in the state's biggest art museum won't
lose you any friends either.

If one
of these factors may have drawn you to the show, be careful it doesn't
obscure Hollander's true brilliance. Her eye has been praised in these
pages often enough; the active ingredient here is the conceptual design.
Down the long corridor of the museum's crannied fourth floor, Hollander
has arranged ten-by-ten-inch color portraits of her Facebook friends
(and their families, where applicable) according to display methods
borrowed from the digital world. Most are shown in a long horizontal
line, as if the photos of an online slide show were strung together.
Others backed with magnets adhere to a giant board, where users are
invited to drag-and-drop them as they wish. A couple others — most
notably the reverent, compositionally stunning portrait of local art
maven June Fitzpatrick — are larger and framed; to continue the analogy,
they're the exhibit's profile pictures.

WESTBROOK, Maine - In a digital world where you can friend and unfriend Facebook connections with a keystroke, what is friendship, anyway?

That was one of the questions photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander had in mind when she started traveling the country, shooting portraits of her Facebook friends last year. An exhibit of her ongoing Facebook-portrait project, “Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend,’’ opened at the Portland Museum of Art yesterday.

Hollander had been photographing close friends for years, and she found the response to the work was mixed. “Essentially, it was, ‘Why should I care about your friends?’ ’’ she says.

TANJA ALEXIA HOLLANDER: Are You Really My Friend

More

When she couldn’t photograph people in their houses, she shot them where she could: musicians on tour buses, an artist, Kyle Durrie, at her mobile letterpress studio inside a retrofitted truck.

She witnessed friends, many of whom are artists, struggling with the sputtering economy. Several showed off how they are managing. “I’ve never seen so many chickens, prize roosters, and gardens,’’ she says.

Hollander’s studio is at the Bakery Photographic Collective, in a mill building in a Portland suburb, where she has lined the wall with a miniature mock-up of the “Are You Really My Friend’’ installation. In the museum exhibit there are two large framed prints and dozens of smaller unframed ones arrayed side by side for 70 feet - along one gallery wall, around a corner, and down another.

Hollander has started blogging and shooting video, which you can see atwww.facebookportraitproject.com. So far, she has visited 144 homes and just over 200 friends. She hopes to photograph all of the 626 Facebook friends she had when she began the process (she has more now).

Best known as a landscape photographer, Hollander has always been an analog artist: shooting on film, printing in the darkroom. Her lush, square landscapes soak in atmospheres of fog and mist, cloud and water. But she didn’t feel challenged by that work anymore -
“I knew what kind of fog would happen when,’’ she says - so she began to
experiment with portraiture.

"Wayne Curtis & Louise Klaila, New Orleans, Louisiana.”

Her Facebook exhibit is designed to be as interactive as the social medium itself. In addition to the long lineup of portraits, there will be a magnetized wall where viewers can arrange photos however they like, curating their own small shows. They can photograph the results with an iPad and send them to Hollander, send comments to her on the iPad, or leave a sticky note.

For this project, the artist has abandoned the darkroom for Photoshop and digital printing. Initially, when the enterprise was Web-based, printing wasn’t paramount. “Not every image was up to my high quality. I’m using natural light, and some are going to be backlit or out of focus,’’ she says.

Hollander had previously met most - but not all - of her Facebook friends, although, she says, “You really don’t know who a high school random is from 20 years ago.’’

She had not met Jona Frank, a California photographer. A curator had suggested they friend each other.

“I was late to joining Facebook,’’ Frank admits over the phone from Santa Monica. “My husband said, ‘You’ll get all kinds of requests.’ And two weeks later, here’s Tanja asking to come to my house.’’

At first Frank resisted inviting a stranger in. “The idea of her coming to my house felt really personal,’’ she says. But she read up on Hollander, and felt reassured.

“I know what it’s like as a photographer,’’ Frank says. “You ask people to do things you wouldn’t normally ask. I said yes.’’

Hollander took a photo of Frank and her dog, Shep. “She knew exactly what she was doing,’’ Frank says. “She has a real sense of space, and how it conveys who the person really is.’’

The Internet allows people to be invisible, Frank says. “Tanja’s pictures take away that invisibility. They give people a real sense of how these people live.’’

Hollander says she and Frank are now friends. “If this whole project failed, that relationship would be a great thing,’’ Hollander says.

But the project hasn’t failed. It has taken off. And that’s another Facebook phenomenon. “I didn’t realize this would be an incredible marketing tool until four months in,’’ Hollander says. “I was posting, people were reposting. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram - social networking is the best marketing tool for artists in this economy.’’

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Currently and coincidently, both the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Portland Museum of Art
in Maine are opening major photography exhibitions this weekend. The
Currier is filling two large galleries with a show of 125 modernist
photographs from its own collection. The Portland Museum of Art is
showing a selection of the 600 photographs in post-modernist
photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander’s social media portrait project, Are You Really My Friend?

A New Vision features photographs by a who’s who of 20th
century photography, among the greats being Berenice Abbott, Ansel
Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Lotte Jacobi, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray,
Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston. The show
also features late-modernist works by contemporary photographers such as
Paul Caponigro, Lee Friedlander, and Frank Gohle.

Modernism covers a lot of complicated ground from abstraction to
surrealism to minimalism. Post-modernism essentially rejects the
inherent formalism of modernism in favor of a more conceptual approach
to art, one in which the art object is less important than the idea it
embodies.

Samantha Appleton by Tanja Alexia Hollander

Are You Really My Friend? by Tanja Hollander fits the
post-modern bill perfectly because, superficially, it consists of
environmental color portraits of the artist’s family, friends, and
online “friends.” Conceptually and collectively, however, the portrait
photographs ask the question, “Is friendship something photographable?”

Hollander, one of the co-founders of the Bakery Photographic
Collective, began her social media project a year ago while
simultaneously writing a letter to a friend deployed in Afghanistan and
sending a Facebook message to another friend making a film in Jakarta.

“On one hand,” Hollander writes, “the letter has a tangibility
that makes it seem more genuine and real, while on the other hand social
networks provide an immediate way to be part of people’s lives all over
the world, often through photographs.”

In order to explore the mode of social media communication and the
meaning of friendship, Hollander resolved to travel all over the
country photographing her 626 Facebook friends. The visual dimension of
the project is given depth by the fact that the artist is physically
visiting and meeting face-to-face with her cyber-friends. Hollander has
been gathering support for the Facebook project by, among other things,
selling what amount to subscriptions the prints to underwrite her
travels and her work.

Toby and Lucky Hollander by Tanja Alexia Hollander

As Hollander is an artist, many of the portraits are of fellow
artists and their families. My favorite is Hollander’s portrait
of Samantha Appleton, a Maine woman who until recently served as the
White House photographer. I also got a kick out of Hollander’s portrait
of her parents, because the photograph was taken in the Hollanders’
dining room, which for 40-plus years was my grandparents’ dining room.

There are both a social and personal aspect to Are You Really My Friend? that highly recommend it to public viewing, just as there are social and historical aspects to A New Vision that make it a must-see.